Oct. 7 – Security forces saved Israeli village from bloodbath, IDF probe finds

Border Police rescued two women from the terrorists as they were being abducted.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

The IDF investigation into its failure to protect Moshav Yekhini and its environs praised individual soldiers, police officers and civilians for preventing many more deaths than occurred there during the Hamas invasion of October 7, 2023, in a report released on Wednesday.

Eight Hamas terrorists arrived in a pick-up truck at the unprotected, but locked front gate of the moshav hard on the heels of a man and two women who had fled by car from the Nova dance festival and entered a bomb shelter right next to the gate when they couldn’t get in.

They executed the man, Ilan Avraham, after he refused to cooperate with them by talking to people in the moshav.

The two women ran out of the shelter and tried hiding behind their car, but the terrorists caught them and started to carry them away.

A Border Police commander, Eran Kalimi, who had rushed from his home about three kilometers away to reach the town of Sderot with several men after hearing that terrorists had in vaded, arrived on the scene during the abduction.

His small force of four engaged the terrorists in a gun battle, saving the women, as the terrorists ran into the moshav through an open pedestrian gate.

The policemen entered the moshav through a different gate and were told by a resident that no one in the moshav was armed.

One of the biggest failures noted in the report was that the Yekhini’s emergency squad had no serious weapons, just personal guns, because the IDF had decided to collect their rifles five years earlier, despite the moshav security officer’s protests.

They had also not received training to deal with infiltrations, and only two of the 13 squad members tried to engage the terrorists.

An IDF major who lived in Yekhini was killed trying to defend his home by firing at the terrorists with his personal weapon.

The terrorists murdered three other residents, one dying of his wounds because he was not treated in time.

Kalimi was shot twice and and a Maglan unit officer who joined them was also wounded.

At 7:49, the report said, a unit from the elite Sayeret Matkal unit entered the fray after realizing that a battle was taking place in Yekhini.

By 8:04, barely a half hour after arriving, five of the terrorists escaped through the fields and set up an ambush on the nearby Route 34, where they proceeded to murder a total of eight civilians, including three foreign workers, and one Maglan officer who rushed to engage them.

Three of the terrorists were killed eventually by a police commander as they were fleeing a Border Police unit on the road, and two were caught by the police as they tried to make their way to the neaarby town of Netivot.

The three terrorists remaining in Yekhini hid in an olive grove for two and half more hours.

Border Policewoman, Sgt. Ravit Hanna Assayag, was shot and killed when she entered a structure one of the terrorists had hidden in.

In all, four soldiers and Border Police officers were killed either in or around Yekhini before all the terrorists were eliminated.

Moshav resident Zechariah Hajbi said the terrorists had precise intelligence on Yekhini, as they had headed for the house that belonged to the security chief, who happened to be in Thailand on vacation.

Hajbi said they murdered his grandson because “they thought he was the head of security.”

Moshav committee head, Shalom Yifrach, charged that while the report professionally delineated what had happened, “we didn’t hear what in practical terms is being done to prevent the next massacre.”

The army, he said, “brought more vests, equipment and weapons, but the bottom line is that the they need to train the emergency squad, assess the moshav’s needs – and connect us to the [defense] systems in the area. We heard less about that.”